Recent reviews by spencyrrh

Yakuza 0 is a long (30 – 100 hours), single-player beat-em-up / role-playing game set in a yakuza-infested, inner-city 1980s Japan. It is a prequel to the Yakuza series, with the same high-stakes, character-driven plot. Players hastily press combinations of buttons, and enjoy hours of drama. I enjoyed it. Try it if you have any interest in action or Japanese society.

Western audiences get told Yakuza (properly 龍が如く (ryū ga gotoku), or ‘like a dragon’) is Japan’s answer to Grand Theft Auto (GTA). Both depict a male mobster in a three-dimensional urban environment bursting with distracting details, but where GTA feels increasingly cynical, Yakuza is more campy and more earnest. GTA’s core mechanics are shooting and driving cars in colossal sandboxes, with conversations playing over other scenes. Yakuza games feature small spaces, with more unique inhabitants. You cannot drive, commit acts of violence, or in any way harm civilians in the open world. Combat comes from SEGA’s arcade beat-em-ups, but most gameplay is peaceful, and originates in Japanese RPGs, like Yakuza’s precursor, Shenmue. Often, you are just watching well-written conversations play out. (Localising this game was a gargantuan achievement.)

The production values are high. I admired this game’s set-piece construction and pacing. The entertainment districts of 歌舞伎町 (Kabukichō) in Tokyo, and 道頓堀 (Dōtonbori) in Osaka are exquisitely realised, more or less as they were in December 1988. The voice acting is unsurpassed, and character animation in the major scenes drips with gorgeousness. The two protagonists are gloriously rubbery, while enemies and friends are depicted with realism straight out of a gritty TV drama. Less important scenes use duller, generic animations and voice lines.

Yakuza 0’s mechanics are fun, but not standout. The combat is limited, and sometimes frustrating. If it has depth, I am too inexpert to find it. (I completed the game on Hard mode, slowly.) Quick-time event ‘Heat actions’, which interrupt normal action with a burst of cinematic mega-violence, are a riot to enact. The mini-games are stunningly various. I enjoyed karaoke, disco and fishing. None of them are bad, but I could stand to see fewer, more polished mini-games and side-quests.

I experienced a small number of frustrating problems. As this is a contrived prequel, some events are intended to set up the main series, and don’t work by themselves. Both protagonists have heel-turn developments which feel unearned. Every 20 minutes or so, Yakuza 0 freezes for several seconds on my high-end hardware, with no other applications running. This appears to be a common problem. Some gameplay features are explained in bewildering detail, or not at all. I do not know how to play 将棋 (shōgi) or 麻雀 (mahjong), and this game will not help me learn.

Business side-quests uncritically replicate capitalism’s drive for financial rationalisation. Yakuza 0’s writers are aware a lack of oversight led to the Japanese market crash of 1992 and the 失われた二十年 (ushinawareta nijūnen) ‘Lost Twenty Years’ of economic stagnation. However, the player must drop huge sums on relatively minor upgrades, and a culture of prestigious affluence is represented without much comment. Admittedly, the キャバレークラブ (kyabarē kurabu), i.e., ‘cabaret club’ side-quest is disarmingly intricate and beguiling, and it is a lot to ask that a triple-A video game based on the romantic myth of 極道 (gokudō, or ‘the way of the yakuza’), responds to Marxist analyses of capital, but the point stands. The game illustrates the gap between the myth of chivalrous yakuza, and the reality of murderous thugs on the edge of legitimate business. This tension can never be resolved, because the avatar is a positive protagonist, and yet also a yakuza.

Sometimes, the game is gross to marginalised groups. Japanese society is insular, and thus, usually more through ignorance than malice, can be racially insensitive. Chinese immigrants receive unusual sympathy in this game, except the final boss, who if not evil because he is Chinese, is at least evil through being Chinese. Two minor characters are お釜 (okama), or ‘butt hole’, media caricature conflations of trans women, transvestites and gay men. The mainline plot depicts a blind woman who must be protected by violent, able-bodied men. At one point, she is drugged ‘for her own good’ so men may discuss further violence without sullying her innocence. The particular Japanese inflection of the misogyny here may catch unfamiliar Western players off guard, although it is no more ubiquitous than in any other high-budget title marketed to young men.

That said, Yakuza 0 depicts with intense admiration the loving and mutually supportive relationships which can exist between straight men. The way Kuroda Takaya says 兄弟 (kyōdai), or ‘blood brother’, breaks my heart. Now for the next game.

This is a very small (20 minute) puzzle game. The premise is an allegory about British and US foreign policy toward Iran in the 20th century. It's free and short, and it's good.

Mohammad Mosaddegh was Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 until 1953. He was a champion of secular, democratic values, and sought to modernise Iran by nationalising its oil industry. Having been democratically elected by the people of Iran, he was overthrown in a coup organised by the CIA and British intelligence services.

Why was nationalisation of oil so contentious? In the early 1950s, many key industries in Western states were nationalised, or part-owned by the state. The UK had itself just nationalised its coal and steel industries. But as the Cold War developed, the US became more hawkish about any states showing socialist tendencies. As the UK's might withered and its postwar ration economy continued to struggle, the British state attempted desperately to assert its interests in the Middle East.

This revanchiste British foreign policy, upheld by a Conservative administration but instigated by a Labour Prime Minister, would eventually culminate in the disastrous attempt to hold the Suez Canal of 1956. It also meant protecting British supplies of cheap oil. If the Iranian government were to control the nation's oil reserves, then it could set its own prices. When Mossaddegh sought to limit the influence of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the AIOC refused to cooperate. Iran responded by nationalising their assets. The UK initiated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, and began an extensive programme of bribery and co-ercion to protect its interests in Iran. The situation escalated into a coup signed off by the British and US governments at the highest levels. A democratically-elected government had been overthrown by a foreign power for trying to take a local resource into the people's hands.

The Cat and the Coup briefly tells this story using a few headlines, photographs, mockups, and collage art. The game is a sequence of about six vignette puzzles, each of which takes about two minutes to complete. Mossaddegh's ghost enters a room symbolising a moment in his own memory, and the player, his cat, forces him to leave or encourages him to follow a falling object. It's all rather strange, and not overly polished, but it's intuitive enough, and not difficult enough to be frustrating. The animations are lovely. I think you should play this game.

Cibele is a short (rougly 90 minutes) PC-use simulation game with interstitial filmed scenes about forming a first romantic relationship and building an early sexual identity online. It's about the awkwardness of that interaction, the potential unhealthiness of disappearing into that relationship when it only exists inside an MMORPG, and the power dynamics which exist between vulnerable, isolated teenagers online. Playing Cibele looks like exploring the file system on a femme anime fan's desktop, and logging onto a grindy MMO to talk to a boy over voice chat.

The developer is clearly trying to convey this experience of forming an early relationship through an online community. Many of us had first loves just like this. I can relate to it. The characters are shy and uncertain even when it's abundantly obvious that they're attracted to each other. The 'love' between them comes from a real desire to connect and express affection, but is ultimately shallow because they're not full adults with the self-knowledge and real empathy gained only through experience. The male character's perspective is softly misogynistic, and the protagonist is mostly earnest. In my experience, that's broadly how young men and young women act online, because it's how they're socialised to behave. I thought the writing was the strongest part of the game. The value and the demerits of this relationship are nuanced. It's a deep portrait of a shallow romance.

I found clicking in the file system difficult, because I'm used to a mouse cursor set to very high sensitivity, but that may be my own hangup. Fittingly, the MMO mechanics are repetitive. That's okay, because the gameplay of the game-within-a-game is hardly the star of the show here. Character depth, cute digressions, and some important information is held in the file system on the protagonist's desktop. I especially liked the writing about Final Fantasy X-2, which I played at this age, and which was also important to me (although I remember caring more about the dresspheres than about Rikku's secret past with Gippal).

Valtameri (the Finnish word for 'ocean'), the fictional MMO the protagonist plays, is a pastel fantasy world with in-game social hierarchies, just as real MMOs have. It's a femmey, pretty world with static rules. The love interest's avatar in this world can cross boundaries our protagonist cannot, and deals more damage to enemies than the player avatar. His movement is assertive, and the player's is necessarily reactive. At one point, the love interest pooh-poohs the Final Fantasy series. The protagonist is clearly a fan, and the developer has said that the game is based on her experiences in Final Fantasy XI. The protagonist plays it down, but there is a power relation here, and a performance of the masculinity which debases and eats femininity.

If you grew up in the noughties, you may remember performing your identity online by putting lists of bands you liked on LiveJournal, and complicated outcomes of how young men sexualise young women, and how young people of all genders sexualise themselves. Please play this game, and reflect on your experiences, or perhaps the alien experiences of others. It's the story of what it's like to be a young woman receiving flattering male attention. This is the story of who we were, and of who some of us still are.

BANG BANG BANG! is a small, board-game style local multiplayer game, best for parties. You must be the last player standing in a four-way gunslinging contest. The mechanics are simple, but there's a lot of fun to be had.

This game does not require familiarity with games conventions. It can be played by almost anyone, although it handles best using a controller. It's aggressive and fast-paced. Excellent with friends on a Saturday night.

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is a medium-length (ten hours or so) action-focussed 2D platformer with discrete levels gated by unlockable abilities. Whether it's strictly Metroidvania is arguable; I see it more as part of a tradition of Genesis, SNES and GBA side-scrolling platformers like Aladdin or Duck Tales. It has bright, colourful pixel animations, with hand drawn art which highly sexualises womens' bodies for dialogue scenes. The soundtrack is Jake Kaufman digital studio work. The main game is easy for platformer players, apart from the last level, but there are lots of extremely difficult achievements.

The gameplay is polished. By time spent, there is as much combat as platforming. There are dozens of enemy types, and traveling to your destination normally means killing three or four of them over and over while moving from left to right. The odd fetch quest and minigame are thrown in too, including one very memorable sequence in which you carry a manipulative undead woman through screens of one-hit-KO hazards. The bosses are huge, and generally involve a simple puzzle, which reveals a small hitbox. Defeating them without being hit (except for the first one) is phenomenally difficult. I found the game unchallenging, but fun. Risky's affects give Shantae several abilities which meaningfully empower the player's movement through physical space, so you start to feel superhuman by the end. The final level is bereft of enemies, and doubles down on tight platforming. I began playing games on the SNES in the early 1990s, and this was my bread and butter. I loved the last bit of this game. I just wish it had gone on a little longer.

The plot is a MacGuffin. Shantae teams up with her old nemesis, the malevolent purple pirate, Risky Boots. Her ability upgrades are not genie powers, but Risky's piratical affects, which have been stolen and hidden around a bizarre archipelago. It has genuinely sweet moments, but it's mostly a network of gags. Games in this genre are frequently weighed down by mountains of stultifying lore, so it's a relief that Shantae gives you the bare minimum and lets you play. Worldbuilding and atmosphere are instead provided by the music, gorgeous art assets, and pleasing animation.

The music is full of bangers. I don't think there are any bad tracks. For a platformer, you mostly want upbeat, high-tempo music to keep you motivated and give you momentum, so the songs are fitting. I have found myself humming them while driving or working.

This game was mostly made by men, and it mostly stars half-naked women with body types which straight men usually find appealing. Men in this game are caricatures, and their extremely diverse bodies are not sexualised (with the possible exception of a cyclops, whose undress is played for laughs, and who receives no sexual attention). A couple of animations (and the entire spritesheet of Risky Boots) aside, the sexualisation exists mostly in the art which accompanies dialogue scenes. I found that I was never entirely comfortable with this part of the game. For what it's worth, the strongest suggestion of sexual interest or romance is between Shantae and another female character, and it is written very innocently.

I also don't feel great about the co-option of Arabic folk religious tradition in the Western trope of the 'genie', although that battle was probably lost shortly before my birth, with the publication of the Arabian Nights in 1706. Thankfully, the trope is not very intrusive here, although Shantae's hometown resembles a pop cultural imagining of Arabia, circa 1200. I'm white, and not best placed to say how harmful this depiction is.

I had fun running around in this world, and I intend to pick up the next instalment.

This 2013 reboot re-envisages an ancient franchise as a high drama action-adventure with heavy third-person shooting and light puzzles, rather than a 3D puzzle platformer wherein you must sometimes shoot a tiger. Perhaps you would call that merely a change in emphasis, but it feels very different. Tomb Raider is a good romp and technically impressive, but despite the hype around the new design, the misogyny and normalization of violence in the main character are still present, and there are notable mechanical and racial problems. The delights for me are the collectibles and animations.

The main character is the thing. Lara is now a vulnerable freshman explorer, tagging along with a more experienced crew, who gets into serious trouble. She has been redesigned with humanoid proportions, and a lot to learn. The game shows her getting hurt a lot. Much is made of her vulnerability, but even grievous wounds are quickly shaken off, and after an hour or so she is slaughtering men by the dozen. She soon becomes much the same hardened murderer as so many other game protagonists. Her in-game barks ('Run, you bastards!', 'I'm coming for you!') evoke a bloodthirst at odds with the storyline of an innocent young woman doing her best at a time of crisis.

I found the original series hard to play because Lara was designed and exploited to titillate a certain demographic. The new Lara has an actual human body. She is still normatively pretty, and thin, with very large breasts. Some people look like this, but ultimately, games over-represent these bodies to pander to the male gaze of their perceived audience. I think the most generous thing I can say is that Lara is desexualized relative to her previous incarnation, but still recognizable. And there is another form of misogyny at play here too. A friend of mine put it that the player is encouraged to want to protect this young girl. There are a great many gruesome death animations for Lara, and the danger she is put in is frighteningly sexualized at the beginning of the game. The enemies are all men. In fact, there are only three female NPCs, and one of them has no lines. For me, this is only a partly successful reboot, and largely for these reasons.

Raiding tombs is now an optional side quest. Each tomb is a single room puzzle with a chest at the end. I enjoyed these deviations from the main narrative, but I was disappointed that the chests contain nondescript treasures. When Lara gasps and grabs one, we aren't shown what it is. I think this was a missed opportunity. Elsewhere in the game, there are dozens of 'relics': artifacts from centuries of Japanese history, modern tchotchkes, and mementos from World War 2. They are well-rendered, beautiful objects, and they inspire interest in real archaeology. Finding these relics and hearing Lara's commentary on each one was my favourite part of Tomb Raider. I wish the tombs had been integrated into that mechanic, but I recognize that the mechanics of a project on this scale are developed separately, in parallel. Unfortunately, when turning over relics, Lara serially mispronounces 'Edo': unbelievable for a professional academic working on location in Japan. But the relics help to illustrate what is best about this game: amazing production values. It just looks a treat. There are animations for every little thing. Even the way Lara flicks water from her forearm when drying off is perfect. The textures are lovely, even if they can be a little gamey. Whole buildings and setpieces are lovingly put together, and then only seen once, for a few seconds. In short, you can feel every cent of the one hundred million dollar budget spent on this game.

Platforming feels good. It's forgiving and intuitive. Lara's jump is quite floaty, but it doesn't feel silly. I generally felt like I had 'just made it' through action sequences, and only had to replay a couple of sections.

The gunplay is standard non-technical third person cover shooter fare. I thought it was fine, but I would rather have done less of it. You can upgrade weapons, but the process feels a bit distant and automatic. There are a lot of Quick-Time Events (QTEs; essentially abstractions during which you are prompted to press a button to simulate having Lara react quickly to a dramatic situation), but never for things which really matter. I lost track of the number of times I had to press X to catch a ledge during a cut-scene, just for the ledge to collapse, but I wasn't involved at all when Lara treated her own wounds, upgraded her weapons, cremated her mentor, or put herself in danger to save her best friend.

A lot of white men made this game, and it shows. At the end, we're shown photographs of the Crystal Dynamics crew. 90% of them, including the senior staff, are white and male. They clearly worked hard, and it's great to see people of colour in the main cast, but there's also a lot wrong. The game is set on an island off Japan, but the antagonist and protagonist (Matthias and Lara) are white. The only Japanese character who is actually alive is Japanese-American. Jonah, a Polynesian cook and sailor, is one of the few people Lara can rely on, but he is painted as a kind of 'mystical person of colour', with an unexplained sixth sense about the spiritual forces at work on the island. Reyes, the ship's mechanic, is another likeable ally, and one of the very few named black characters, but has been fleshed out with a predictable subplot about being a hardass single black mom with a missing baby-daddy.

About three quarters of the way through, there's a miniboss battle with a very large black man. The framing of that fight, with tiny, white Lara swearing at him, and brutalising his body, implicitly draws on centuries of racist caricature. There are no other boss encounters except at the very end, so the depiction really stands out.

The single-player campaign is about eleven hours long. Collecting all of the trinkets may take another six or seven hours. The multiplayer mode doesn't really interest me. It consists of fairly standard team-based shooter objectives on small maps.

Tomb Raider (2013) is no feminist reworking, but the criticisms of it as exploitative have been overstated. In this game, Lara is not sexually assaulted, so far as I can tell, although many seem to have drawn that conclusion. I cannot recommend this game to everyone, because not everyone has the time and energy for hours of shooting, and it is very bleak and violent at times. But if you want big action, and you want to see how pretty a game can look, you can do a lot worse. Just understand what it isn't.

Rose of Winter is a short (a single playthrough of one storyline lasts about an hour), earnest visual novel about a romantically inexperienced, though not naive, young knight, escorting one of four attractive young princes across a treacherous, snowy mountain. The writing is good, the experience is touching, and the art and music are just right for the experience. Some people will never enjoy a story about a sweet young woman falling in love for the first time with hot mystical men. For everyone else, please buy this game.

Magnolia Porter (the writer) and Aatmaja Pandya (the character designer) have created compelling characters, thanks in no small part to their nuanced treatment of femininity. The main character, Rosemary, is a large woman, who is aware of her size and how it is perceived, but the writing never dwells on that. She occupies a masculised social role (that of the physically competent chivalrous knight), but is not ashamed of her femininity. In fact, she keeps her hair fluffy, her armour has pink highlights, and she is very naturally a sweet and nurturing person. She is hired to protect men, and sometimes they take issue with her role, but never because she is a woman. Though I have my favourites, the four princes are all interesting people, and none of the four main plot arcs are predictable.

Mechanically, this is a standard small-scope visual novel. There is a lot of text, with the occasional dialogue choice. Most of the time, you're watching Pandya's full-body character illustrations emote over beautiful backgrounds by Victoria Grace Elliott, but for tense or intimate scenes, the scene cuts away to a full illustration. There are something like six music tracks, and I think the stirring ones move me more than the tender ones do, but they're all lovely. The animation involves simple digital manipulation of the assets. A couple of scenes involve characters navigating across a river, carrying each other, or fighting. It is possible to do this very poorly in visual novels, but the movements here are very smooth.

This game will make you feel cute. You can romance a very pretty dragon boy and the colour palette kind of reminds me of fondant. Please take a few hours out of your life to play a little game made by a small team of artists who really care about their craft, and want you to share a story of burgeoning love between mutually respectful individuals whose fantasy lives subtly reflect the complications, little injustices, and real feelings of the real world.

Resident Evil (Remake) is a beautiful object of design which delivers a pleasurable and precisely managed play experience, but its mechanics and structure are stylized in the fashion of late 90s survival horror games. It's not for everyone.

The premise is a medium-length (i.e., the first playthrough is ~9 hours) single-player, linear 'survival horror' game played with fixed camera angles and set in a mansion populated with zombies and genetic aberrations. You need to kill a few things, understand the physical space, manage your inventory and use of items, and solve the odd puzzle. This game is very good-looking and powerfully scary. Fear here comes mostly from suspension of disbelief, and a very tense atmosphere, but there are a small number of contextual jump scares too. The hallmarks of later Resident Evil titles (quicktime events, over-the-shoulder cameras, fully rendered 3D environments, modular item management, and big action setpieces) are entirely absent. This game is much quieter and more delicate.

Like the many ornate keys the player accumulates in the game, this game feels bespoke and carefully produced. Every art asset is rendered lovingly, with an eye for detail. The mutated shark models have scars on their skin from where they have become aggressive with one another in their pool after having been abandoned. Each zombie's dress and injuries implies their backstory, and there are many zombie character models. The items the player collects are fetishistic totems, whose gorgeous polygonal models can all be examined closely in three dimensions. They include Yale lock keys, first aid kits, weapons (including a simulacrum of the Colt Python revolver), a large battery, piano scores, and X-ray scans. Every item has been crafted with obvious love and care. It has become a useless cliché to write of a game's 'fully realized world', but items, character models and lavish backgrounds are the core of Resident Evil (Remake)'s incomparable atmosphere. Because the game uses fixed camera angles, its backgrounds are pre-rendered textures, and there are relatively few 3D models on screen at any time. Spareness is presumably one reason for its high production values. The fixed camera angles give the level designers cinematic control over tone, which is rare in modern games. There is no capacity for the player to debase in-game suspense by constantly jumping or moving the camera during a crucial moment. A new room may open with the camera on the avatar, against the door, so you can't see what's ahead. In short, it looks great. This is a minor 'high definition' update to a game released in 2002, but the game has barely aged at all. Only graphics buffs or very superficial players will feel that they are playing an outdated title.

The controls and mechanics of the game are very much of their era. In this game, you control your avatar using so-called 'tank controls', which nominally resemble those of a traditional tank in that you cannot simultaneously turn and advance forward. Unusually for a 3D video game, pushing forward on the stick moves your avatar in the direction they are currently facing. This control system has always been controversial, and is now widely dismissed as a relic. There is an option to switch to a more conventional control system in the menu. Players will find their own most comfortable playing style, but the game was designed for tank controls, and I believe they are necessary for full enjoyment. This game is about suspense, ad hoc strategy, and uncertainty. The slight awkwardness and feeling of limitation which tank controls offer suit the setting. This game's fixed camera angles, which can switch between very different viewpoints, make conventional 3D world control systems unintuitive. The player can become disorientated easily as they move between screens. Tank controls alleviate this problem, because the player always has a sense of their current direction and momentum.

Plot barely features in this game. Cutscenes are minimal (although countless variations of scenes exist for players with different play conditions), and the optional backstory is explored mostly through text documents or exquisite environmental storytelling. You may find a couple of the characters irritating (personally I can't stand Chris, one of the playable characters), but what little dialogue there is can be skipped. As it is now fashionable to say, the story of the game is the story of your playthrough. I have found that I end up with a very particular relationship with certain rooms in the mansion. Ammunition and healing items are sparse, such that there are generally more zombies than you can kill in a given area, and unless they are properly disposed of (through fire or removal of the head), zombies will return, flush with their own blood and saturated with a more mature form of the plague virus, as the deadly 'crimson heads'. For these reasons, it is generally more desirable to avoid zombies than to engage them. But certain areas of the mansion are connected by narrow corridors, making escape difficult. The player therefore has to monitor their resources, managing ammunition, physical space, health and healing items, and inventory space, all of which are limited. Compromises must be made. That's a lot of the fun.

A few recommendations to maximise your pleasure: play it at night. Try not to seek help for the hard parts (unless a puzzle is totally stumping you, because a couple of them are very obtuse). Turn up the volume.

The HD Remaster is a delight. Every inch of curling wallpaper and dry rot is now visible! I just have a couple of complaints. A very select few of the master textures (such as the letter Wesker/Barry pins to the wall outside the East Wing save room) were obviously never designed to be seen at this resolution, and they really should have been replaced like other models have been. More inexplicably, great effort has been put into adding a 'physics boob jiggle' to Jill's walk. The effect is to dehumanize and overtly sexualize a well-loved character. Watching Jill animate is now an item of titillation for the presumed heterosexual male player. I think it's very myopic and dull of Capcom to add this feature. If nothing else, it is absurdly unrealistic. Jill's chest now undulates at a steady pace, independent from the rest of her body, whenever she walks or runs. It makes me more aware of the game as software, and harms its chief achievement: its extraordinarily tense atmosphere. This feature was missing in the 2002 release of this same game. Sadly, in every other way, this HD Remaster is the superior edition.

Please play this game. I don't normally go to bat for flagship releases from major studios, but Resident Evil Remake is a beautifully crafted artefact.

tl;dr: This is a piece of budgeting software which demands that you allocate all of the money you earn to specific tasks. It's a bit expensive, and this version of it is a little basic, but depending on your situation, it could really help you manage your money.

Ultimately, YNAB is a complicated Excel spreadsheet. If you're willing and able to build a comparable spreadsheet to yourself, then it has a few unique features, but they're not really worth the pricetag. I was not willing and able, and I have come to value those features.

When you first open YNAB, you enter your current bank balance, and then you record every financial transaction you make. But it differs from some other budgeting software because it requires you to 'give every dollar a job' (other currencies are available). That means that every penny you earn is allocated to a specific future purpose. It is as though you have already spent it. I find this allocation system very useful, because I am never unsure how much money I can afford to spend in a given month. I never have to calculate how much I need to leave in my bank account to cover rent, utilities, or travel. If I want pizza, I just open my app, and see how much I have to spend in my 'Eating Out' category.

Because of its focus on your present and future spending, YNAB is not particularly interested in your past spending habits. You can examine which categories you spend money on, and your net worth over time, but the emphasis is elsewhere. If this is a priority to you, there are better choices for budgeting apps.

Budgeting is important, and YNAB has made me better and more confident at it. But no matter how good you get at budgeting, or how great the tools at your disposal are, the best ingredients for healthy finances are higher income and lower spending. So think carefully before you buy this tool, I guess.